This is Halloween!

Halloween lesson ideas for teachers; classic Halloween movies to watch for students; Personal experience - Polina Dreyer.

Oct 25, 2021

HALLOWEEN LESSON IDEAS

Tis the spooky season and everyone is putting finishing touches to their Halloween costumes. Whether you celebrate this holiday or not, teaching a themed lesson may provide a much-needed break from the routine and lighten up everyone’s mood. It also teaches about the target culture and customs, boosts motivation and it is oh so much fun! Let’s look at some of our favourite Halloween lesson ideas!

The History of Halloween

There is a popular Youtube channel called “Bet you didn’t know” which makes cool animated videos about various little-known facts. One of them talks about the history of Halloween - its origins, how it came to the USA, what it looked like at first and how it became the commercialised pumpkin-spiced festival we all know today. The videos are quite short and the main information is visualised in pictures and diagrams, but the pacing is rather fast, so you might want to slow it down a little, especially for lower levels. There are a lot of pre-made worksheets for this video, or you can make your own. The students are sure to be surprised!

Talk about superstitions

Halloween is closely associated with the belief in bad luck and the supernatural, so putting together a lesson on superstitions will be in the spirit of the holiday. Tie in 1 conditional and you are all set. Start off by showing pictures that illustrate various superstitions - a broken mirror, a black cat, a dropped fork, or spilled salt. Discuss what these can be about and introduce the word “Superstitions”. At this point, you can already discuss if the students are superstitious and what makes people believe in bad luck in general. After that do a matching exercise - sentence halves (If you see a black cat / you will have bad luck) or ask more advanced students to finish the sentences with their own ideas. After discussing the structure, students may continue remembering various superstitions they have heard of.

Creepy copypastas

A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. Copypastas are said to be similar to spam as they are often used to annoy other users and disrupt online discourse. One popular theme of this text is a horror story, and together with its size (relatively short, just a paragraph) and the language used (simple) it makes it a perfect tool for an English lesson. Make sure your students are not faint-hearted or select the texts very carefully.
Some of the ideas you may use - ask students to finish a copypasta and then reveal the original ending, match the text and the ending, come up with a title for the text or write their own creepy copypasta.

Witches, potions and spells

This topic may be more interesting to teenage girls, but in various adaptations may appeal to virtually anyone. You may discuss the history of witchcraft or even watch another Bet You Didn’t Know video. Talk about famous witches in culture, or read about the Salem trials, define who may be called a witch and finally proceed to their attributes and occupation. This is where you may tie in cooking and poetry - potion recipes are perfect to revise cooking verbs, and a lot of students have read or watched Harry Potter, so they will be familiar with concepts. They may even come up with their own ingredients and their properties. Rituals and spells often involve rhyming, so this is where you can ignite the students’ creativity and ask them to write their own spells after the examples!

Horror Films

Halloween is a perfect time to watch some classic horror films with a mug of hot cocoa, popcorn and a company of friends. You may discuss all-time favorite films with your students in class as well! Divide students in teams and ask them to write down as many horror films as they can remember and then play a guessing game. You may also do a matching game with movie posters and short summaries, watch trailers and learn to write reviews, or even get creative and come up with a plot and title for your own Halloween inspired horror movie. Teenage students will love making posters for those in Canva or some other app.

Do you have your go-to Halloween lesson ideas? Please, share!

15 CLASSIC HALLOWEEN FILMS TO WATCH THIS WEEK

Just like Christmas has its music and Valentine's Day has its chocolates, Halloween simply wouldn't be Halloween without the movies that go along with it. The jack-o-lanterns, costumes, and candy apples are nice, no doubt. But to really set the mood? There's nothing like a movie night filled with all the greatest chainsaw-wielding, spell-binding, hair-raising flicks to get you in the spooky season spirit. You don't have to be fan of horror to appreciate a good Halloween movie either–some of them aren't even scary! They're just full of the October goodness that we only get 31 short days to make the most of. So break out the stash of extra candy, turn off all the lights, lock every last door, and settle in for the best of the best Halloween movies. Here, find 35 that we think you won't want to miss.

Scream (1996)

This clever-yet-scary slasher movie/black comedy stars a variety of big stars, from Courtney Cox to Drew Barrymore, and continues to be a fan-favorite hit.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

This is a true classic the whole family can enjoy. For more than 50 years, Snoopy and the gang have been getting families old and young into the Halloween spirit. The animation might even make you nostalgic for childhood memories of trick-or-treating.

The Addams Family (1991) & Addams Family Values (1993)

When it comes to the Addams Family movies–that’s right, not just the first but the second, too!–there’s a lot to love. Great jokes, campiness, and gothic style? Plus, Angelica Huston is a total vision as Morticia. Consider these perfect viewing for anyone who loves the Halloween mood, but could do without actual scares.

The Omen (1976)

“It’s all for you, Damien!” You’re not a real horror buff if you haven’t seen this ‘70s classic. Gregory Peck and Lee Remick star in this demonic film, which is reportedly remembered as one of the most cursed movies of all time.

Hocus Pocus (1993)

You can't go wrong with Hocus Pocus. The family friendly comedy stars Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy star as three Salem, Massachusetts witches, resurrected just in time for Halloween.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is a cornerstone of the horror movie genre, making it a must-see this spooky season. Mia Farrow plays a young woman whose husband makes a deal with the devil without her knowing.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Almost a decade before Scream, Wes Craven gifted the world with one of the most infamous movie villains: Freddy Krueger. But it’s not just a slasher flick with a gruesome lead, it’s held up by a compelling premise and storyline that will definitely leave you scared to go to sleep. Did we mention this was Johnny Depp’s acting debut?

The Haunted Mansion

Disney doesn’t do a whole lot of scary, but when they do, they sure do it right. Eddie Murphy brings his comedic genius to this spooky story of a family that ends up trapped in a (you guessed it) haunted mansion due to a case of mistaken identity. While we’d still classify this as family friendly, note that it might be on the scarier side for some young viewers.

Friday the 13th

What starts off as a fun movie about teenagers working at a summer camp quickly turns sour as Jason Voorhees appears on one Friday, the 13th. Hockey masks have never been the same since this flick’s 1980 release featuring Kevin Bacon.

The Shining (1980)

If you're looking for a good fright, alongside cinematic prowess, turn on The Shining. The Stanley Kubrick-directed film has become a horror movie classic, tracing an innkeeper who goes off the psychological deep end.

Halloween (1978)

Few movies are as appropriate for Halloween as, well, Halloween. The slasher movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis and follows a mental patient and murderer who escapes a sanitarium and returns to his hometown to stalk innocent passersby.

Halloweentown (1998)

A movie perfect for the whole family, Halloweentown follows a young witch named Marnie, torn between her normal life and her grandmother's home in an enchanted place where it's always Halloween.

Labyrinth

This film was a collaborative effort by Jim Henson, George Lucas, and David Bowie. We’re not sure how such a star-studded project came to happen, but we’re sure glad it did. One girl has 13 hours to save her brother from being turned into a goblin by Bowie, the Goblin King. This one is rated PG, so it’s safe for family movie night.

Child's Play (1988)

A doll possessed by a serial killer? Sure, why not. This movie introduced the infamous Chucky character, who will certainly make you look at children's toys in a different way.

Beetlejuice (1988)

This Tim Burton horror/comedy follows a ghost couple who haunt their prior home, alongside, of course, a devious poltergeist named Beetlejuice. Watch for the laughs and THE famed striped suit.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

I’m Polina, twenty-one, a university student, English and Japanese major, aspiring award-winning novelist, and these days I’m tutoring kids English on my own conditions, but it all started earlier this year when I was offered to substitute a (middle-aged, experienced, Soviet-taught) teacher at this English club. I had two groups under my wings, an intermediate and an upper-intermediate advertised as advanced, and I taught them for three whole months until the summer holidays. I had to plan it all, pay for the Zoom subscription, hand out and grade homework, and try to be as nice as possible about any expected absences. Not bad for the first job experience!

Let me preface this little How-To by saying that a large portion of my experience simmered in the pot called ‘Good Old Zoom Lessons’. It therefore may not give you a full taste of what teaching is really like when you bring thoughtful printouts and whatnots to class, but, the whole thing turned out to be something digestible anyway! So this is an overview of my practical and, I suppose, mildly creative process of Making The Choice.

Before planning a themed lesson, it’s always a good idea to ask what theme your students would like to focus on. One time with my older kids (average age: difficult sixteen) I had to steer the boat and make that decision on my own. We centred the next chunk of lessons around the topic vaguely related to gravity — space adventures. So we started a new book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (I still stand by it being a great choice for advanced readers) by Douglas Adams, and, logically, reeled our class discussions towards the topics of space travels, alien invasions, and apocalypse, and I found out that teens these days think too realistically and don’t particularly enjoy British humour. (Then they had to take their high school exams, so the lessons stopped altogether and we never finished the book and I was real sad, but anyway.) Sometimes, nothing remains but to implement the ‘Bring It to Class and Vote’ strategy (meaning, the students find a piece of content of their choice and whatever the majority votes, wins).

Another thing to consider about planning out a themed lesson is how are you going to relate the content to your new grammar. If you’re reading a book, try looking for a pattern. Ask yourself, like I ask myself all the time: perhaps there’re lots of conditionals? Participles? Compound-complex sentences? Indirect speech? Or you’re just practicing constructing dialogues or, usually with the beginners, honing your present tenses. But what’s most beneficial about sticking to a specific topic throughout the whole lesson, is packing a toolbox of related vocabulary and drilling it. As with the Hitchhiker’s Guide example I discussed earlier, some of the ‘space travel’ (and ‘future’, and ‘apocalypse’) vocabulary we picked up on were: global warming, nuclear weapons, satellites, and even celestial. Obviously, make a list of words before you teach the class, but always leave the window for question marks open. The more students ask, the more things they get to learn.

Moving onto the next point, don’t just nail everything down to one piece of content — this is a kind piece of advice that I had to unkindly turn into a sort of law for myself since I frequently get lazy. Read a chapter of a book, and then watch a video related to the topic. Or play a game — it’s always a good practice for new vocabulary and grammar and for you to stop shying away from acting silly. And then throw in lots of exercises. Exercise templates are free real estate. No brainer.

Another approach to lesson planning you can take is choosing what vocabulary block you want to teach, and then picking a theme. Here’s yet another example of my experiments on my teen class: the long-term task was to improve their writing skills, so the roundabout way to that goal was to focus on things they could write about — my metaphorical Twister arrow stopped on the ‘character’ square — then I introduce some character-writing hacks, then we learn the advanced lexicon for describing one’s appearance/attitude/attributes, then — attempt to produce our own work. What’s important about teaching essential skills is giving examples. I, myself, wrote a whole essay on my favourite character, which I then diligently brought to class for analysis and some colourful highlighting, and then we just… worked on things related to the concept of ‘character’, both in literature and in a less poetic sense. During these lessons, we practiced synonyms (in the context of emotive language) and composing long, complex sentences, all while discussing the broad theme of ‘character’. Admittedly, a slightly more boring approach, but still something to consider when working with advanced learners.

So, to summarise:

Choose a theme you can stick to. By which I mean something that doesn’t bore your students, something you can continue exploring for lessons to come, and something obviously applicable to either your students’ interests or real-life matters. Sometimes practical knowledge comes above hobbies.
Group all the related vocabulary. This should be self-evident.
Incorporate grammar that can be used to talk about the topic at least to some extent. Narrowing the scope of the class to health and wellbeing? Should’s and have to’s are your best friends when we’re trying to interpret a doctor’s advice.
And, finally, don’t forget the variety of class activities! Reading, listening, speaking, writing — practice it all with some ‘fill in the blanks’ and ‘put in the correct forms’ and ‘is it true or false’.

That’s all for now!
Stay spooky 🎃

Amazing insights